You can only mature in your true sexual orientation

After I wrote my post on Lindsay Lohan’s agonized response to the break-up of her two-year lesbian relationship, I realized there is something else I need to point out.

You can only mature emotionally and psychologically when you are living in your true sexual orientation. You cannot mature — or heal — when you are faking being straight. And I’m totally leaving out the damage living a lie does to the people around you.

This lesson was one of the very first insights I had after coming out in 1972 when I was 18 and a freshman at the University of Michigan. This was three years after the Stonewall riots in New York City, which marked a new era in gays and lesbians refusing to live closeted, false lives and claiming their true identities.

The common trait of being lesbians brought together a remarkably heterogeneous group of women in terms of ages, education, professions and social class. So I was in a community of women most of whom were five to 30 or more years old than I was. What surprised me was that when apparently mature women, even those middle-aged and older, left straight marriages and came out, they invariably seemed to turn into teenagers.

My theory is that these women’s emotional and psychological growth stopped at puberty when they were forced into suppressing their lesbian sexual orientation and began to fake heterosexuality. However old they were when they came out, they still had to go back to the time when their real growth and maturation had stopped and begin again from there.

This thought came up from my Google search on Lindsay Lohan — one site included a slide-show of all her exes, all men except Samantha Ronson (I think — I didn’t check all umpteen photos). If Lohan is a lesbian and Ronson was her first relationship, emotionally she’s in her mid-to-late teens, not her 20’s.

I’m counting the fact that people can only mature emotionally and psychologically in their true sexual orientation as another reason to support equal rights for gays.